cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/7647192
Basically, it’s a game about making and changing rules, much like actual legislative bodies. Each player proposes a new rule and the other players vote to approve it or not.
Who wins? Whoever reaches the victory condition. What’s the victory condition? That’ll depend on the rules at the time, which might change in the next turn.
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.
— Peter Suber, The Paradox of Self-Amendment
This seems super interesting and I’ve never heard of it before. Thanks for sharing!
Is this more of a table top game? I’d be interested to see it as a kind of MMO.
It’s more of a mailing list or forum game, where you can check on the state of the rules at any time.
It can be played as tabletop, but that involves a lot of handwriting, and who’s got time for that in 2023?
Someone to act as the writer while the rest of the group debates and votes should work. Imagine people then fighting over to make rules such that the writer may never type in specific words!
That’s doable… if you make it a rule!
In my experience, the game tends to get very “meta” very quickly. Someone could add a rule that “nobody write down the rules”, unless you had the “person X writes down the rules” as an immutable rule, so the moment someone wants to make it mutable… beware!